THIS SUMMER Milwaukee, Wisconsin, will host the Republican National Convention (RNC). Thousands of Republican acolytes will converge on the city, one of many urban centers that the GOP has consistently disparaged as liberal, Black, and dangerous. The selection of Milwaukee as the site of the convention portends conflict. Attendees, steeped in the white nationalism permeating Republican party rhetoric on everything from immigration to gun laws, will encounter the denizens of a city that they have been taught to despise and fear. Many Milwaukeeans, in turn, will be protesting against these attendees’ presence, and against the RNC taking place in their city at all.
Those arriving for the conference are also likely to be aware of the 2021 Rittenhouse verdict in nearby Kenosha, which held that an armed counter-protester who shot at and killed demonstrators in a protest of the 2020 police shooting of Jacob Blake was innocent by virtue of self-defense. The Republican Party supports unbridled access to guns and applauds “backing the badge” against broad public calls for racial justice and police accountability. Testing out this verdict, which authorizes violence against nonviolent protesters, may be part of the unstated lure of Milwaukee as a site for the RNC.
It is against this backdrop that months after Milwaukee was announced as the RNC host, the city’s venerable Fire and Police Commission (FPC) voted to suspend, for the duration of the convention, a recently passed police accountability policy that had been won through years of grassroots organizing: a transparency requirement that would make officer body camera footage of critical incidents like police shootings rapidly available to impacted families. For a fraught two weeks in July, police-involved violence will be shielded from public scrutiny. Notably, both the decision to invite the RNC to Milwaukee and to suspend the body camera requirement for its duration were made possible by Democratic leadership at the city and state level.